Lost when it comes to Loops!

[I-AM]

Hello All,

I have used Acid before and have come up with some fun stuff, but not so much as for live recording and playing back-IE recording a guitar part I would like to have looped and syncing it with the beat that is looping.
I am totally lost when it comes to this and was wondering if anyone could guide me in the process of creating and editing that guitar part into a loop.
I also have sound forge 6.0 for editing and still can't seem to get my loop to sync right with the beat.
Can anyone offer any advice.
Also-while I am at it, since this is the Sonic Foundry forum I will throw this question out here and also post to the computer recording forum.
I just got a brand new puter; AMD Athlon 1.43 GB
DDR 256 RAM; M-Audio Delta 66 audio card and tons of hard drive space. OS Win 2000 pro.
My question is; I know my computer can handle audio editing (my old celeron 400MHZ with 192 ram could!), but when I tried recording and playback with ACID and Soundforge it would chop a little bit/ pop and crack/ hesitate while playing back what was recorded. Is there a better setting for the buffer size in these programs I should be using vs the default settings?
Thanks again for the help.

[FZfile]

....I just had this long reply and then my connection got screwed up and dumped me.

Anywho......Acid4 has a BeatMapper tool that will calculate the tempo and beat markers of a recorded snippet based on the accents of the sound and place a "beatmap" or grid that you can finetune to get your downbeats in line.

I dont use the beat map that much though.

I like to set up a loop to play along to and pan the loop hard right.
Then I set up my guitar or keyboard to be panned hard left.
I record both on a single stereo track in SF6.

That way you have a discretely recorded track (albeit a mono one) that sits right on top of the loop so you can see exactly how it will line up.

Select thesnippets to taste and "Acid-ize" them by setting the number of beats, the tempo, the key, and weather its one-shot or looped and save.

this works very good when I want to comp together a part.
I cant just play and experiment over a loop of a certain feel and then chop it up and arrange the pieces I like together.

About the computer.
Plenty of stats.
Go to www.sospubs.co.uk/ and search the articles for optimizing Win2000 for music and also go to the computer forum here and do a search for the same.
The guys here really helped me out a lot when I was building my "Franken-box".

Basically it comes down to turning off every piece of hardware and software you dont need for music.
......i.e. modems, internet, printers, antivirus, etc.

-mike